1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a sensorless adaptive safety actuator; in particular, to a sensorless adaptive safety actuator applicable to automated robotic manipulator systems which safety actuator operates in the absence of active sensors.
2. Description of Related Art
Interaction with automated mechanical devices often poses potential danger. While the advancement in robotics automation encourages development of high speed, high precision industrial robots, these sophisticated pieces of equipment generally lack the capability of spontaneously reacting to uncontrolled environments. Therefore, traditional safety measures in handling the automated mechanical devices is to segregate them in a constrained environment, such as a factory assembly line, and keep the human operators at a safe distance away from the operating parameter of the automated machines.
Modern advanced robots are frequently endowed with active electronic sensors to provide their human operators safer human-machine interaction experiences. Some robots are even equipped with active emergency stopping devices as an extra protective precaution. For one thing, the manual emergency kill switch that responds to human input that often accompanies heavy robotic equipments is a primitive example. More sophisticated active safety measures may require the utilization of optical sensors, pressure sensors, audio sensors, etc. Moreover, these sophisticated sensors generally require specialized processors properly programmed to process the information gathered by the sensors. Thus, the active safety measurements are often expensive to implement, occupy precious space and loading capacity of the automated robots, and require high levels of maintenance efforts to function properly. More importantly, a majority of robot-related accidents happen during regular maintenance when the active sensors are deactivated and rendered useless. Thus, over reliance on active sensors in sophisticated robotics poses inherent risks as the melt function or deactivation of such sensors would render the robotic devices incapable of safely reacting to environmental variables, including their human operators.
To enable more thorough integration of automated robotics into modern daily life, there exists a need for developing a passive sensorless actuator applicable to automated robotic devices to provide reliable and cost-effective safety protections.